Having written this trip's first blog a couple of weeks ago, I couldn’t bring myself to post it. This trip is not what we expected it to be, and for the first time I’m going to share the end of the story now, then return to the trip in future blogs.
By the time you read this we will be home, but Agy won’t be. In fact Agy isn’t coming home. We hope she will soon be off having more adventures, but it won’t be with us.
We never imagined we’d be sharing this news, but we are actually feeling very happy. As you know, Agy is more than a van to us, we love her, she’s taken us to places we never imagined and she feels like family. I think that’s what made this harder. When we bought her, I was working, we lived in central London, she was our only transport and our longest trip was a fortnight.
Now, we aren’t working, we certainly don’t live in central London and most trips are a minimum of 6 weeks, at times we’ve travelled or lived in her for 3-4 months. We also have Lucy (our little car).
I think we have both been in denial for a while, but on this trip we had a conversation that has changed our lives. Agy, however fabulous, isn't right for us now. She is utterly brilliant and has enhanced our lives, but it is time to move on.
As we rattled along the Irish roads (they really did make her rattle, we thought our Isle of Wight roads were bad.. But.. oomph, these were something else!), struggling to find places to stay as campsites were closing for the season we came to the hard realisation this wasn’t working. Somehow it all came together, Ireland (for us) wasn’t working and Agy had some flaws we’ve been trying to ignore for a while because it felt unthinkable. Me needing Ian to get up if I need a wee in the night is not ideal, as we get older scrambling up into her high bed will get harder, she’s quite small for long trips, and the fridge is tiny.
One of the best things about travelling in a van, is that you can choose what you do, where you go and how you travel. We’d had some time in Ireland, seen some beautiful scenery, visited interesting places, but we were ready to head home, so we changed our ferry booking and set off for home.
We had the most beautiful sailing, a calm sea and stunning sunset arriving back in Birkenhead early evening about a week ago (when you read this). During the sailing we continued our conversation and did a lot of research, and decided we’d stop off and look at some potential options for new vans on the way home. We felt terribly disloyal discussing this in Agy, so somehow it was easier on the ferry in a cabin where she couldn’t hear us.
I had looked for somewhere we could stay overnight as there was no way we could get home that night. We’ve occasionally stayed at pubs and restaurants, so I decided to look for one about 1-2 hrs away from the ferry port and found one not far from Stoke on Trent, just off our route home.
Arriving just before they closed, the staff were so welcoming, agreed we could stay over, sorted our drinks, served a great meal and gave us a safe place to sleep before heading off towards home the next day. We did however spot a motorhome sales company only 15 minutes away from where we were staying that night, and they had some of the vans we thought we might be interested in, so of course we stopped off, with no intention of doing anything other than having a look.
It turns out, this trip was a little more expensive than anticipated! We found the van that feels perfect for our next stage of travel and life, the price was right and the team great. So here we are staying up north on a lovely little site with amazing views (Agy is tucked behind the hedge) awaiting our new travel buddy to be ready, registered and the reddies to be transferred.
It’s both exciting and totally nerve wracking (what if something happened to Agy in the next few days? Every driver seems a threat on the road!). We really had no plan for this to happen when we left home, but it feels right.
We are due to pick up our new van in a couple of days, as I write (she doesn’t have a name yet, but she will), we are trying to pack up all we have in Agy to make the transfer as easy as possible, and will set off for home once the deed is done. We know when our first trip will be, as we had planned to visit good friends up north, celebrate a big birthday with them, and are going to some very special friends wedding - so we will do that, it will just be a new trip in our new van instead of on our way home from Ireland in Agy.
So here is our end, and beginning…. I’ll post trip blogs soon, but we needed to share this news first. It wouldn’t feel right not to share such a huge change for weeks. We’re sorry if we have been quiet or been a bit cryptic talking to some of you. I suddenly became the most superstitious person ever and felt huge anxiety over telling anyone anything until the handover was complete and we were safely on our way home with our new purchase.
I think you’ll see the difference and how we’ve kept the best of Agy’s features, but have enhanced those we were beginning to struggle with.
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